“Operation Power Off”, operated by international police authorities, has been running since 2022, in which websites with illegal offers are shut down. This week there was a new success: two men aged 19 and 28 were arrested in Hesse. They are accused of operating both a drug marketplace called “FlightRCS” on the open internet (Clearweb) and the DDoS platform “Dstat.CC”. The latter is said to have offered overload attacks on third-party infrastructure as “DDoS-as-a-Service”. Both domains were confiscated.
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Loud was in charge of the campaign Notice from the BKA the Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT), the Frankfurt am Main Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Hessian State Criminal Police Office. However, international authorities are also involved in Operation Power Off; the logo of the American Department of Justice (DOJ) can be found alongside other offices on the seizure banner. The BKA has yet to provide any details on the path of the investigation. However, “extensive evidence is said to have been secured”. The two men are also unlikely to have operated the platforms alone.
Drugs for vape pens
However, the Federal Criminal Police Office provides information about the criminal activities on the two platforms. FlighRCS is said to have primarily sold synthetic drugs based on cannabinoids. According to the BKA, these are becoming increasingly popular among young people for consumption through vaporization devices (vape pens). A comparison with the real “Shiny Flakes” case in Germany is obvious.
What the two accused are said to have done with DStat.cc is apparently more complex. The BKA describes the service as a “central scene platform” for DDoS services. The various options for making third-party servers unreachable are said to have been listed by the accused as in a comparison portal. This in turn is reminiscent of a similar case as part of Operation Power Off from 2022. At that time, the accused said that they had only offered comparisons from, among other things, “stresser services”.
DDoS as a service
However, the authorities strongly contradicted this: The service was said to have made it possible for “any low-skilled person to launch DDoS attacks with a mouse click that shut down entire websites and networks,” said Europol. In the current case, the BKA says: “The platform made it possible for a wide range of users to carry out their own DDoS attacks, even without their own in-depth technical skills.”
Such offers are also known as “DDoS booters”. Only six months ago, another similar case became public, in which Saxon police websites were allegedly attacked in 2023 using the tools of a booter.
(NO)
